DEGREE PROJECT IN COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, SECOND LEVEL STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN 2015 5G user satisfaction enabled by FASP Evaluating the performance of Aspera's FASP PATRIK HAGERNÄS KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 5G user satisfaction enabled by FASP Evaluating the performance of Aspera's FASP Patrik Hagernäs 2015-08-28 Master’s Thesis Examiner and Academic Adviser Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. Industrial advisers Annikki Welin & Tomas Thyni KTH Royal Institute of Technology School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Department of Communication Systems SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden Abstract | i Abstract With Ericsson’s goal to have optimal user experience at 5G’s 2020 release, it is very important to optimize transport protocols and techniques to manage the increasing amount of data traffic. Additionally, it will be important to manage handovers between very high speed 5G networks and older networks. Today most of the traffic is video on demand and the amount of this kind of traffic is expected to increase. Moreover, the current amount of data traffic will increase by an order of magnitude over the next few years. This thesis focuses on radio access networks and the difficulties they face in delivering high speed data traffic. This thesis analyzes one of the most used TCP protocols, CUBIC, as well as a new transport protocol developed by Aspera, called the Fast and Secure Protocol. Aspera’s FASP is a new transport protocol that promises full link utilization. FASP is built upon UDP and uses advanced round trip time measurements and queuing delay to detect the available bandwidth between two communicating hosts. This thesis project also provides methods to realize experiments to assess the limitations of transport protocols. These experiments are conducted in an environment that resembles the upcoming 5G radio access network. Results have shown that both delay and packet loss affect TCP more than we expected and that high packet loss is devastating. In contrast, Aspera’s FASP is very resistant to both delay and packet loss. These results and analysis provide a foundation upon which others can build. Keywords TCP, 5G, emulated radio access network, handover, FASP, CUBIC TCP, packet loss Sammanfattning | iii Sammanfattning Med Ericssons mål att ha optimal användarupplevelse vid släppet av 5G år 2020 är det oerhört viktigt att optimera transportprotokoll och tekniker för att hantera den ökande mängden datatrafik. En annan viktig aspekt kan vara att hantera överlämningar mellan 5G nätverk och äldre radionätverk. Idag är den största trafiken streamad video och prognoser visar att den sortens trafik bara kommer att öka. Prognoserna visar också att all trafik kommer att öka mångfaldigt de närmaste åren. Denna thesis kommer att fokusera på svårigheterna just inom radionätverk. Denna thesis kommer att analysera ett av vårt mest använda transportprotokoll CUBIC TCP, den kommer också att analysera ett helt nytt transportprotokoll utvecklat av Aspera, Fast and Secure Protocol. Aspera lovar fullt utnyttjande av den mellanliggande länken. FASP är byggt ovanpå UDP och använder avancerade tur- och returtidsmätningar för att använda all outnyttjad bandbredd. Denna thesis visar även hur man kan göra experiment för att hitta begränsningar i transportprotokoll. Alla dessa experiment kommer utförs i en miljö som efterliknar det nya 5G- nätverket. Resultatet visar att både förlora paket tillsammans med en hög fördröjning påverkar mycket mer än väntat och att frekvent förlora paket är förödande för TCP. Asperas FASP är i motsats mycket tålig mot både paketförlust och hög fördröjning. Detta resultat och denna analys lägger en grund var andra kan arbeta vidare. Nyckelord TCP, 5G, överlämningar, FASP, CUBIC TCP, tappade paket, radioaccessnät Acknowledgments | v Acknowledgments I would like to thank Annikki Welin at Ericsson for making this thesis possible and providing me with everything that I have needed to complete this thesis. Annikki has been an excellent supervisor helping me with all the questions that have emerged during the thesis project. It has been very easy to conduct the project at Ericsson her guidance of. Thank you for the great help and most of all your availability. I would like to thank Professor Gerald Q. Maguire Jr. for being an excellent academic supervisor and examiner. Thank you for all the interesting questions and answers about my subject and problems. I would like to thank Tomas Thyni for his great technical help and input regarding the lab equipment and conducting the tests. I would like to thank Ericsson in general for all the equipment I have been using for this thesis project and the location I have utilized. I would like to thank Aspera for giving me a research license to use FASP. Without this license, this project would not have been possible. Stockholm, August 2015 Patrik Hagernäs Table of contents | vii Table of contents Abstract ....................................................................................... i Sammanfattning ....................................................................... iii Acknowledgments ..................................................................... v Table of contents ..................................................................... vii List of Figures ........................................................................... ix List of Tables ............................................................................ xi List of acronyms and abbreviations ..................................... xiii 1 Introduction .......................................................................... 1 1.1 Background .................................................................................. 1 1.2 Problem definition ....................................................................... 2 1.3 Purpose ........................................................................................ 2 1.4 Goals ............................................................................................ 3 1.5 Research Methodology ............................................................... 3 1.6 Delimitations ................................................................................ 3 1.7 Structure of the thesis ................................................................ 3 2 Background .......................................................................... 5 2.1 Transport and application layer protocols ................................ 5 2.2 TCP ............................................................................................... 5 2.2.1 Connection establishment and termination ....................... 6 2.2.2 Congestion control ............................................................ 6 2.2.3 TCP Fairness .................................................................... 9 2.2.4 TCP improvements ........................................................... 9 2.3 User Datagram Protocol ........................................................... 10 2.4 Running protocols on top of UDP ............................................ 11 2.5 Aspera’s FASP ........................................................................... 11 2.5.1 Bulk data ......................................................................... 11 2.5.2 UDP ................................................................................ 12 2.5.3 Queuing delay ................................................................. 12 2.5.4 Disk-IO and CPU scheduling .......................................... 13 2.5.5 Related work ................................................................... 13 2.5.6 Summary ........................................................................ 13 3 Methodology ...................................................................... 15 3.1 Research Process ..................................................................... 15 3.2 Test bed design ......................................................................... 15 3.2.1 Hardware ........................................................................ 15 3.2.2 Software .......................................................................... 15 3.2.3 Configurable parameters ................................................ 17 3.3 Assessing reliability and validity of the data collected .......... 18 3.3.1 Reliability ........................................................................ 18 3.3.2 Validity ............................................................................ 19 4 Running tests ..................................................................... 21 4.1 Test sets ..................................................................................... 21 4.2 I/O problems ............................................................................... 21 viii | Table of contents 4.3 Processing problem .................................................................. 22 4.4 Baseline ...................................................................................... 22 4.5 Aspera’s FASP ........................................................................... 22 4.6 Increasing datagram size .......................................................... 24 5 Analysis .............................................................................. 25 5.1 Baseline results ......................................................................... 25 5.2 Aspera’s FASP results .............................................................. 27 5.3 Potential